Journal

I was very fortunate to have access to the ESRI GIS stack including ArcGIS Info, ArcSDE and ARC/INFO during my time at SKM. However these costs are very hard to justify in a lean startup environment, especially when GIS is not the main purpose of the startup. This is where open source software comes in.
In this article, I will go through how to set up a comparable GIS environment using open source software. Specifically:

• Setting up a spatial database with PostgreSQL/PostGIS
• Importing OpenStreetMap data
• Setting up desktop GIS with QGIS

We'll be using PostgreSQL 9.4, PostGIS 2.2 and QGIS 2.12 in this article, although the setup is largely the same for different versions. ...